Category: General Fiction

All Stories, General Fiction

The Bride of Christ by Mary J Breen

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Every Sunday morning for the past nine years and one month, my mother-in-law has made her dauntless progress up the centre aisle of Holy Family Church on the arm of my husband. This, she believed, was ample evidence that despite his marriage to an ex-nun—holy women all of them, although those who leave their vocation perhaps not holy enough—her Danny’s primary devotion was still to his mother, not to this drab failure of a Grade Three teacher who got her claws into the school principal, no less, the gentle, much-loved Mr. Lynch. Sweet and kind and considerate with his staff and with the children, but away from school, the embodiment of an ineffectual man. But I didn’t know that then.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Paper Flowers by Thomas Sanfilip

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Fiction is a reconstruction of reality, duplicitous by nature because it forestalls the recognition of what exists, what changes, what constitutes the real nature of reality. Easing into narrative is a delicate series of steps, the task of memory and imagination putting flesh to bone, clay to hearth, shape to shapelessness. Night becomes day, for the man sitting still inside the house is like so much firewood waiting to burn, like leaves gathering and recircling, collecting and dispersing in a fierce wind, taking the dead to their last place of refuge. You want him living, breathing, thinking, but imagination is depth and breadth. There is too much to remember, like the broadness of the sea when it rises and collapses.    

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All Stories, Fantasy, General Fiction

The Bridge at Drochaisling by Anthony Billinghurst

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Georgia was being difficult before we landed in Dublin, which was nothing new. She changed and became assertive the second she was promoted to Deputy Head at her primary school; she even adopted a power walk. It’s true the flame of our marriage no longer burns like a log fire, but it does glow like anthracite when fanned enough. My friends who noticed told me I’m hen pecked but as Georgia said, I needn’t wonder if I’m hen pecked, she’ll tell me when I am.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Anne: Office Monster by Michael W. Clark

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She shouldn’t have red hair.  Also, it shouldn’t be the red that it is.  It is a dye job, a bad dye job.  She should act her age, but it’s not clear what that age might be.  She has too much energy for her skin.  Her skin has the pale of age, old age, too many years, is the phrase I would use.  Her skin had too many years on it for the energy she had.  Her thin pale epidermis indicated she should be slow moving, if not immobile, bed ridden maybe, but not walking faster than all the other employees.  People so much younger, so much stronger, should have so much more life than she had.  Her energy and her fire engine red hair, they just weren’t right. 

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 350- An Antisocial Experiment, Five Magi, A Special Announcement and Hell’s Jukebox: The Love Songs

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An Antisocial Experiment

There are endless social movements dedicated to improving people by requiring them not to be like people. Depending on your point of view this activity lies somewhere between education and brainwashing. I am old fashioned to the degree that I believe a person is influenced by both her upbringing and whatever chemistry is peculiar to her. You do your best to raise a child and if she grows up to be a doctor or a teacher you share in the credit, if she turns out to be a Josephine Mengela or the incarnation of Lizzie Borden, you shoulder some of the blame.

A person can improve. But people, as a whole, seldom do because there are “leaders” who want you to do as they command and will reward “good behavior” with letting you spend your life gazing into your phone and punish “bad thoughts” with unsupported accusations and placing you under the spotlight on the scaffold for a good old fashioned cyberstoning. This has been going on in one form or another since the invention of the third person–the first child who decides that her parents should be severely sanctioned for bringing her into this overlighted, loud and dreary existence, as well as not allowing her to have a phone until she can use one responsibly.

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All Stories, General Fiction

As If He Still Drives a Capri

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In the lull between my husband’s condemnations, I reminded our daughters that each Sunday is a Christmas. This way of thinking is Karen’s idea. She does Fridays and Saturdays in the shop with me.

She said when sorting citrus, ‘When life serves you lemons–’ and I held up my hand and asked, ‘Is there a cliché for grapefruit?’

Karen couldn’t think of one.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Hacienda of Love by Monika R Martyn.

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The weather app on my phone lies and says there’s only a 10% chance of rain; it’s raining. I listen to the sound of the soft rain as it mingles with the stillness evaporating with the rising sun. The world sleeps, and only the doves are awake with me. Humidity is 96%. Maybe it isn’t raining after all, and the sky is merely sweating. It’s hot in Mexico.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Except with Strangers by Rachel Sievers

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I stood there naked. I let a small smile tickle the corners of my lips. I watched several people’s lips do the same. These were people who came because they understood what being naked meant. These were people who were here because they liked my craft. Knew about my craft. These were not people that I was nervous in front of. They had explored my work and enjoyed it and were here because they wanted to see it and be part of it. I liked these events. I liked sharing my nakedness with them. It was easier to be voluble to strangers. 

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All Stories, General Fiction

Her Special Day by Nicholas Katsanis

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Clara looks up from the edge of the bed. Her eyes are red and swollen. She dashes to the wardrobe, blurting something about a different pair of shoes.

“The black flats are fine, hon,” I say with my softest voice. Next thing I hear is her scream, the crash of the shoe rack, her sobs: those unbearable sobs that cut through my flesh. I rush to the closet. She’s curled up at the corner, empty boxes strewn everywhere. The edge of her hand is bleeding.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Dixcove by David Chappell

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It was not the love of eating fish that drove Kwajo out to sea, though he knew that taste better than most.  Nor was it the love of clawing with his paddle through the powerful waves and currents, or struggling to drop the net overboard and then retrieve it when heavy with catch.  Every morning, the fishermen waited on the beach for the third wave to blanket the collision of the first two, aimed the bow of their dugout canoe at the horizon and shoved off into the chilly mist.  As he listened to his father’s chant to motivate them, young Kwajo did it because he was proud to work with men.

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